The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

by John Koenig

trumspringa n. the longing to wander off your career track in pursuit of a simple life—tending a small farm in a forest clearing, keeping a lighthouse on a secluded atoll, or becoming a shepherd in the mountains—which is just the kind of hypnotic diversion that allows your thoughts to make a break for it and wander back to their cubicles in the city.

looseleft adj. feeling a sense of loss upon finishing a good book, sensing the weight of the back cover locking away the lives of characters you’ve gotten to know so well.

the Til n. the reservoir of all possible opportunities still available to you at this point in your life—all the countries you still have the energy to explore, the careers you still have the courage to pursue, the skills you still have time to develop, the relationships you still have the heart to make—like a pail of water you carry around in your head, which starts off feeling like an overwhelming burden but steadily draws down as you get older, splashing gallons over the side every time you take a step.

OZURIE feeling torn between the life you want and the life you have Consider Dorothy, the orphan girl of Kansas, sitting up in her bed at the end of the movie. While the credits roll and the music swells, with the Land of Oz still fading from her eyes, she whispers to herself, “There’s no place like home.” Eventually, of course, she knows she’ll have to get out of bed, put on a pair of ordinary black slippers, and carry on with her life on the farm. Counting the chicks, darning the stockings, pushing gray eggs around a cast-iron pan. She’ll play around with Toto, just as she did before. And when she opens the door, she’ll step out into a world of black and white, into a broad sweep of flat land that reaches the edge of the sky in all directions. And she’ll know that she’s not in Oz anymore. She had her rumspringa and chose to return, which means she is now a confirmed Kansan.

Which will it be—Kansas or Oz? Life as it is or life as it could be?

aubadoir n. the otherworldly atmosphere just before 5 a.m., when the bleary melodrama of an extremely late night becomes awkwardly conflated with the industrious fluorescence of a very early morning. French aubade, an ode to the morning + abattoir, slaughterhouse. Pronounced “oh-bah-dwahr.”

funkenzwangsvorstellung n. the primal trance of watching a campfire in the dark.